Photoshop Crafty 2

This is another PhotoShop thing I put together. Gotta love PhotoShop!

If you've been to my blog before, you know that I've been drumming for close to a year now. The company I go to for my lessons is In Rhythm. Most of the people that attend the classes are djembe players, there's only a couple of us that play the djuns. They have some of the coolest t-shirts they sell at events, but they only have them with djembes and djembe players printed on them. So I thought about it one evening and began playing with different images to see if I could come up with something that I could put on a shirt. It took me all evening, but this is what I came up with. I don't know why, but it's coming up green. The finished product is brown.

Each bit is from a different photo, the sticks, the hair, the torso, the drums were actually a picture of my own, and the feet even belong to someone else.

I sent it to my friend at In Rhythm to see what she thought of it, and the company wanted it! How cool is that! So I was able to broker a deal with them and they now own the rights.

It was a fun little project and this was another area where I learned some valuable lessons for the future. I can hardly wait to get a shirt of my own, with my own work on it!

Bargello Beauty part 2

I'm getting to the home stretch of this gorgeous quilt, and wanted to share it.

When I was last here, I was off to cut the strips for this quilt... I just got done... lol, no not really.

First I needed to sew all these strips together in the gradient I wanted

















Then I sewed two more of the same colour gradients on to this, so 33 strips in all. I then sewed the beginning and end strips together to form a tube. The tube is then folded to make it more manageable to cut.

From there, the new strips are cut, This is one of the two tubes I needed to create and as you can see, the farthest end is the one that has been squared up and that's the end I've cut the new strips sets from.















Following this pattern, I cut each of the strips in the size called for on the pattern












Like this. I then had to move each strip down, or up, following the pattern, pin them together, and sew them up. Sound easy? Not really, I kinda lost the plot a couple times and had to do some "un-sewing", but how are we to learn if we don't make mistakes? There's a step here that I'm purposefully not mentioning, 1) due to copy write laws, and 2) because I don't have the picture to accompany the step, but this step was my undoing a couple times. You canNOT watch tv while doing this part.


















This is the first half sewn together.

And this is with the first and second borders. I went with one of the creamy colours for the first border, just because it's got such a pretty pattern. The second, larger border, I chose because it will match the couch it will be on really nicely. The little white marks are actually little red and white flowers.


















And here it is hanging over the banister and then laying flat on the floor.














I just love the movement, and because the colours are so pretty and rich, you hardly notice all the mistakes!














The next step, I'm planning to make a foot pocket on the back... you know how when you're trying to cover up on the couch in front of the tv, your feet always stick out at the bottom... the pocket will be about 18" deep, go across one end of the back, and will also have batting so it will be cozy warm. I'll quilt it as well, in a diagonal pattern to make it stronger, then sew it to the quilt before putting the binding on.

After creating the foot pocket and before I attach it, I'll flip the quilt over, put the batting down, then the back, pin it all together and begin the quilting process. Since the fabric and pattern are so intricate, I'll keep the quilting simple.

After the quilting is done, I'll square it up, sew the foot pocket on, then the binding. Then it will be finito! Finished, yay!

But I really have fallen in love with this quilt, it's just too pretty not to love. I may have to make one for myself! With all the gorgeous fabrics that Janelle has at Pieces to Treasure, the possibilities are endless. You can also get this pattern from her website.

** Thanks for the question Marty Michelle. The fabrics I used were selected out of a whole bunch of different ones. I have to admit, Janelle helped by knowing where all of her colours were and pulling out a bunch in the same colour family. Out of about 20 she pulled out, I chose 11 for the final product. She has so much at her shop it would have taken me hours to find it all.